When your coworkers are your family, what happens to the bottom line?

There are 5.5 million family businesses in the United States. Family-owned businesses contribute 57 PERCENT of the GDP and employ 63 PERCENT of the workforce. That means family-owned businesses employ over 98 million people in the U.S. alone! Considering that family dynamics can be so complex in and of themselves, how does it work when families don’t just live together, but work together?

We Are Family

Aleeza operates a nursing home with her husband and his siblings. While initially it was just she and her husband, Michoel, who ran the place, over time Michoel’s siblings came to work for the home in various capacities.

When Aleeza and Michoel were newlyweds, enjoying their shanah rishonah in Israel, they got a call from Michoel’s father telling them he was burnt out and wanted to give up the nursing home he owned and ran. He told them if they wanted to take over the business, it was now or never. He was either selling it to them, or, if they didn’t want it, to someone outside the family.

“We basically cut our year in Israel short, hopped on a plane, and, as 21-year-olds, took over running a nursing home, not having any idea what we were doing,” Aleeza says. “It’s a miracle our business survived. It’s a miracle our marriage survived. It was a really hard time. It’s a hard business when you’re in your forties and you’ve had 20 years of experience in the working world. But when you’re 20, and you don’t know what you’re doing, success is just a miracle.”

Dorothy Stoll didn’t intend to start a family business at all. She was living in Los Angeles, just about to make her first bar mitzvah, and was speaking on the phone to her brother, Phillip Tewel a”h, a caterer in Detroit. She was telling him how she’d really like to make a nice bar mitzvah, but it was so expensive, and they joked that they should just make a Pesach program and make the bar mitzvah at the program. A destination simchah, if you will, long before that was even a thing.

They took this not-entirely-serious idea seriously enough that Dorothy started looking into possible hotels to use. Her brother flew out to take look, and when they saw the Riveria Resort, “We knew it was the setting for our event.” They liked the ballrooms, and they liked that the ballrooms and conference center were completely separate from the hotel. The kitchen was extremely large and easy to kasher. Her brother told her he could make it work.

“We reserved 100 rooms, thinking we would have 300-400 people, something like that,” says Dorothy. Since Phillip had been working as a caterer for many years, he handled the food ordering and gave an estimate of the food and food-related labor costs. Dorothy compiled the hotel costs, entertainment costs, and then together they calculated a fair market price for the program.

“We did very little advertising. We did put a couple of ads in the local Jewish paper, and I handed out a flyer at my children’s school. It was basically word of mouth and the news spread from there,” Dorothy recalls. “Then it kind of exploded. Everybody wanted to come. In the end I think we had 300 rooms and over 1,000 people, baruch Hashem, and the rest is history, as they say.” This year will be the 29th year she’s running World Wide Kosher Pesach Retreats.

Bracha Goetz is the Harvard-educated prolific author of many children’s books including, Let’s Stay Safe, Hashem’s Candy Store, and My Very Own Mitzvah Hands. Her youngest son and daughter-in-law, Binyamin and Avital Goetz, had a cedar closet full of her books. They affectionately called this closet “The Goetz Bookshop” and would occasionally sell books when someone asked, or when Bracha came to town and did an author event.

Binyamin and Avital were both working in chinuch, but as their family expanded, they searched for something that would increase their income. As they brainstormed different business ideas, Avital says, “Hashem literally just put into our minds the idea to take Ima’s books to the next level.”

Avital and Binyamin had a vision to not just publish and distribute Bracha’s books, but also to expand the ways her message could be shared, going beyond printed books to include audio books, videos, as well as consulting opportunities and presentations. When they came up with the idea, Bracha was already working on a manuscript. Avital and Binyamin asked her to please let them try to publish it. And so The Goetz Bookshop and Publishing House was born.

Avital quit her job, and her husband, still an enthusiastic first-grade rebbi, devotes what free time he has to help run this family business from their home in Houston. They recently released Don’t Read This Book, their publishing company’s second book and Bracha’s 42nd.